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Comment by gamble | Hacker News Reader

I was agog when I downloaded the LaTeX binary install for my new Mac a few years ago and discovered how massive it was. LaTeX is almost as big as the entire operating system disk!

What on earth is in there?

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The full TexLive distribution contains all officially accepted packages ever written (this includes fonts, iconography, compiled documentation and other heavy stuff), most of the compilers, the LaTeX and Context (MK II and IV) packages and a huge toolchain. For compatibility reasons, packages are (almost) never removed. Also for compatibility reasons, the LPPL (Latex Project Public License) discourages[1] the release of a modified package under the same name, so there are copies within the distribution.

So, the TexLive distribution is the "fire-and-forget"-package in the LaTeX world, thats why it is so big. I use it for around 10 years now and I never had to install an additional package.

[1] It even prohibited that for a while, see Wikipedia.

Vast numbers of packages to do just about anything you could possibly want.....

Things like inserting graphics with text flowing around them (picins), or document classes for resumes,or textpos (for absolute text positioning), or......

Basically you have nearly two thousand such packages in TexLive......

I can suggest the BasicTeX distro; it's only 69MB, and has always been sufficient for my (admittedly rather basic) TeX needs.

http://www.tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html

I remember installing it a few weeks ago on ubuntu to update my cv.

The base system was 280+ mb along with 190+ mb of documentation. I found it mildly amusing that I had to download ~500 mb of stuff just to update my cv.

Uncompressed, it's about 50% documentation and 35% fonts.

I was also surprised. I installed miktex which is around 200Mb and then it still automatically downloads and installs even the most basic packages i use from the internet.

Isn't latex from the 80's? I think my first disk that had more than 200Mb is from the early 90's? How did people use it back then? Also it is still horribly slow even on a core2 with 4gb ram and superfetch.

Not the whole thing, but you could start with this:

http://www.amazon.com/Computers-Typesetting-Volumes-Boxed-Se...

[looks sadly at own unread copy sigh]

It also contains almost a gigabyte of documentation (in PDF).

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